Mechanical Wood-Pulps network helping graduates to find jobs

The Mechanical Wood-Pulps Network of Centres of Excellence has two principal mandates.

The first, of course, is to investigate, research, develop and commercialize new technology and processes for use by Canada's pulp and paper industry.

But the other is to provide a training ground for graduate students ... and the Network does this with flair since in its 10+ years of existence, it has trained a solid cadre of post-graduate and post-doctoral scientists and engineers. These people have worked with the Investigators in each of the scientific programs covered by the Network's first mandate: Mechanical Pulping; Bleaching; Yellowing Inhibition; Process Control; Pulp Processing; Papermaking. The latter program replaced one devoted to recycling last year as the Network moved into its third four-year phase.

Originally, all the training concentrated on the purely technical side of the industry — until last year when the Network took a step unique amongst the 15 Networks of Centres of Excellence program and it launched its Job Skills program.

Conceived, developed and run by Professor Douglas Reeve (but see sidebar), the course is designed around the needs of students who are working in fields directly related to the pulp and paper industry. "Our aim is to serve students in terms of their job and professional skills," says Reeve, who is Director of the Pulp and Paper Centre at the University of Toronto.

The course was announced during the annual meeting in May 1998 and immediately caught the attention of Christa Beaton who had recently joined the Network.

Beaton holds an advanced degree in chemistry from Dalhousie University in Halifax, NS. Her special interests were organic and photochemistry. Being from Cape Breton, she had some idea of Canada's pulp and paper industry because of the proximity to her home of the StoraEnso pulp and paper mill in Port Hawkesbury.

After getting her Dalhousie degree, Beaton decided to go to graduate school and went to Montreal to see what McGill had to offer. She liked the opportunity for breakthrough research in Dr. Dimitris Argyropoulos's work with the Network's Yellowing Inhibition program. That program is seeking ways to stop the lignin retained in mechanical pulps from causing the paper it is subsequently used in from turning yellow when it is exposed to light.

Lignin is the "glue" that holds wood fibres together. It is retained in mechanical pulping and contributes to the higher yields obtained with this method than with chemical pulping. The drawback to this is that lignin reacts to sunlight, for example, so that old newsprint or other papers containing mechanical pulps turn yellow. The Network has found ways to reduce the yellowing effect.

Beaton is working towards a Masters degree in Chemistry. Using phosphorous nuclear magnetic resonance, she is investigating the interaction of lignin with photoyellowing inhibitors. "I find my research challenging, but I enjoy spending time in the lab," she says.

She said when she heard about the Job Skills program at the annual meeting she was intrigued because she had experienced nothing like it before. For example, when it came to writing, she'd had only basic undergraduate English courses covering poetry and literature.

"A thesis seems terrifying if you have no experience in preparing one," she says.

Because of her enthusiasm, Reeve invited Beaton to help to make the Job Skills program work. Now she is the Student Liaison for the program and sits on its steering committee together with Network Board members, Investigators and faculty. She keeps up with the movements of the students, telling them about program developments and encouraging them to participate in its activities. At the same time, she keeps her committee colleagues up to date about the Network's students' needs.

Already in 1998/1999, the Job Skills program has offered the graduate and post-doctoral students: two e-mail-based Writing Skills workshops from September to December 1998 and January to April 1999; an opportunity to publicize their work at a poster session at the Pulp and Paper Technical Association of Canada's (PAPTAC) annual conference in January; the International Technology Tour to the Southeast United States from May 3 to 14; the Job Skills Workshop in Vancouver, May 25 to 26, which was followed by the Network's annual meeting.

Mastering style
The Writing Skills course curriculum was organized by instructor Debbie Repka who teaches Technical Writing at the University of Toronto. She communicates with the students over the Internet. "Debbie is an excellent instructor," says Beaton. "We get feedback in a couple of days by fax."

There were 27 students on the first course. Some were so eager to continue that nine of them signed up for the second course as well. "Debbie's enthusiasm rubs off," says Beaton.

According to Reeve, the students rapidly mastered the essentials of grammar and style, learning basic English structure using examples from the pulp and paper literature. The end result has been increased research productivity and motivation, he says.

"This is not an ESL (English as a second language) course," Reeve emphasizes. "A lot of English-speaking students don't write any better than those from other countries."

Network faculty appear satisfied with the results of the writing course. Investigator Gilles Garnier of McGill University said during the 1999 annual meeting "my two students improved immensely in terms of the structure and content of written material." He said there is also a tremendous value to him as a supervisor: "I spend more time directing their (scientific) program rather than being an editor."

Theo van de Ven, Director of McGill's Pulp and Paper Centre and leader of the Network's Papermaking program, noted it had been hard to get students "to read the literature" before the course was offered.

An Internet-based course is also believed to be more efficient than classroom courses because the students can work at any time. However, the Network also offers funding for technical writing tutoring programs from local writing centres; the funding is available for such courses in either English or French.

Making an impression
How does one find a job? That was one of the things the stduents learned about during the two-day Job Skills workshop held in Vancouver just before the Network's annual meeting. "It went so very well," says Beaton. "We are lucky to have access to a program like this. The job searching information was really beneficial," she says. There were 32 Network students from seven universities.

During the workshop, which was led by Reeve, the students honed their presentation skills: "My confidence with respect to public speaking has improved drastically. And we got to know each other and the faculty much better," says Beaton.

Later, Beaton and three of her colleagues got some public-speaking practice when they made a presentation to the faculty and other delegates to the annual meeting about the Job Skills workshop. They also described their trip to the US Southeast with about 20 University of Toronto students, together representing chemical, engineering and forestry disciplines.

Beaton says the trip increased her sense of the scope of the industry "and my excitement at belonging to it." She had never visited a mill before she joined the Network's Yellowing Inhibition program, and didn't really know what others were referring to when they talked about the mills. "But we were able to feel the heat and hear the noise, and to actually see the mills in action. I have a better understanding now of the diversity of interests which are part of the industry and how they all come together," says Beaton.

The region's highly developed pulp and paper industry is based on southern loblolly pine fibre. The group visited 12 different facilities in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Included were the research labs at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology (IPST — which is similar to the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada also known as Paprican), Georgia Tech, North Carolina State University's papermaking pilot plant and the offices of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (better known as TAPPI and the US equivalent of PAPTAC).

Mill operations on the itinerary included Southeast Paper Manufacturing Co., Dublin, GA., which claims to have the fastest newsprint machine in the western hemisphere. Operating at 5100 ft/min, it makes fresh newsprint from nothing but old newspapers. Other mills included: Westvaco Corporation's operations at North Charleston, SC (the largest paperboard mill in the US); Willamette Industries' kraft mill and medium density fibreboard (MDF) plant (MDF is used to produce such things as furniture); Bowater Inc., Catawba, SC (which produces coated paper and pulp for sale on the open market — Bowater recently bought Canada's Avenor Inc.).

They also visited companies which supply mill process materials and equipment as diverse as sootblowers, paper machine headboxes and kaolin clay.

Beaton says "it was useful for us to see the whole picture — from tree to finished product. We saw things we wouldn't normally have seen, on an industrial scale. AND, we were proud to be ambassadors to the US. I am so lucky to be a part of it all."

Peter N. Williamson is a freelance writer/editor specializing in the pulp and paper industry. He is based in Hudson, QC.